Yupdates shut down on December 30th, 2023. Read more.

Performance

From inception, we knew Yupdates had to be fast; one of its main goals is finding and triaging a lot of information. If you're waiting seconds for pages to load, you feel it. You lose the flow state, are less effective, and are frustrated. It's often a deal-breaker.
Since you're probably in the software industry, you may be curious why it's fast, where your data lives, and how we scale.

Pre-computed feeds

Async

Yupdates has a fleet of servers and serverless functions dedicated to asynchronous processing, from polling to filtering to transforming. We do everything ahead of time and behind the scenes to make the interactive experience snappy, even if it means making extra copies of data for the sake of faster queries.

Comprehensive

One of our core tenets is to be fast for all feeds at all timestamps. If you go looking into the past, it shouldn't feel like a hard drive is spinning up somewhere. It should feel as fast as browsing the latest. It takes a lot to deliver this. Rust services and heavily optimized DynamoDB queries are the foundation.

precomputed feed diagram

Databases

DynamoDB

Few databases in the world can handle petabytes of data and leave you confident there won't be performance surprises or unpredictable costs. AWS says single-digit millisecond performance at any scale, and that's been our experience.

We love the consistency. Often, chasing better peak performance with other databases leaves a long tail of unhappy outliers, especially as you scale.

PostgreSQL

Our web/API layer leaves most of the work to the backend Rust services and DynamoDB, but it relies on a Postgres cluster.

Caches

Over-provisioned cache clusters let us avoid many database queries, making the service even faster.

Scaling

Serverful

We do use serverless functions for asynchronous work, but interactive and API traffic is served by our fleet of Graviton2 instances behind a load balancer for lower, more consistent latency.

That pesky speed of light

Today, Yupdates runs in the US East (Ohio) region of AWS. We're comfortable expanding when it makes sense.

What's that mean for you? Feed queries need one HTTP GET, as static assets are usually cached in your browser. It takes 50 milliseconds or less for the servers to process the request, so most of our customers see a complete feed page load in 100-300 milliseconds. But, in faraway places, the extra transit time may mean it takes 2-3x longer — not the best it could be, but still a second or less.

The best way to see how it works for you is to try it out for free.

Cost model

A significant portion of your subscription goes towards our well-provisioned server fleet, cache clusters, and databases.

Instead of relying on ad revenue and its perverse incentives, the unit economics of each subscription covers the additional load. We're able to buy premium resources and keep buying them as we grow.